False urine specimens are a problem for insurance and other medical examinations, but most tampering now occurs with substance-abuse testing. Substance abuse has become a major national and world problem. It affects health, safety, integrity, job performance, education, morality, the economy, crime and the general social structure. Urine testing is the most practical method of detecting active substance abuse, but it has been of limited value because of tampering and the problems in trying to prevent tampering. The incentives for a substance abuser to cheat are strong. Discovery of drug abuse can result, among other things, in criminal punishment, loss or denial of employment, and in social penalties. Thus tampering is common, and the drug abusers may be devious. Tampering is usually accomplished by a subject's introducing a false specimen into the urine container used for a test. False specimens include urine voided by a drug-free substitute subject or by the presumed subject at a time when temporarily drug-free or a fluid other than urine. A flase specimen is obtained before the test, surreptitiously taken into the private toilet compartment in the test area and introduced into the urine specimen container in place of urine presumably voided by the subject at the time of the test.
In the past the only effective way to prevent cheating has had the serious disadvantage of being offensive to most subjects. It has consisted of having an attendant watch the subject voiding into a specimen container. This procedure has been so generally unacceptable that urine testing has had only limited use. Without a watching attendant, testing is unreliable because there can be no certainty as to the donor or time of the specimen. The unsatisfactory choice, therefore, has been to risk false tests or to violate privacy. The present invention solves this problem. It ensures reliable testing without being offensive. The invention, therefore, eliminates the major objection to testing the innocent, and it does not provide the guilty with an excuse to refuse testing.
This inventor has recently developed other inventions to prevent or detect tampering with urine specimens. With one of these, the use of an ingested tag to identify a subject's urine, a subject may object to swallowing the tag or may claim, without cause, ill effects from the substance. The threat of litigation might be a deterrent to using this method. The other inventions require a complete test area designed to accomplish hand restriction. The present invention is a novel and practical hand-engaging device, which may be employed wherever desired, including a specific test area. Unlike this inventor's previous inventions, the present one need not include means to ensure the identity of the presumed subject. These should be used when necessary.